China

Dissent and the demands of literature

Mo on Mo

MO YAN'S characters are often inspired by real people, if not, in any obvious way, by their politics. His father featured in “Red Sorghum”, Mr Mo’s most famous work. The main character in “Frogs” is his aunt, who was hounded by the press as a result. And his mother was the reason he wrote “Big Breasts and Wide Hips”. Mr Mo’s latest novel, “Pow!” (reviewed in our sister-blog, Prospero), is all about Mo Yan. A ripe opportunity, then, to see for once what the world’s newest Nobel laureate thinks of the Chinese state and the role of the writer within it?

Mr Mo has been criticised for not thinking what people think he should think about China. More subtle critics attack him for not having an opinion at all. He addresses this in the new book’s afterword: “What about ideology? About that I have nothing to say. I’ve always taken pride in my lack of ideology, especially when I’m writing.”

Perry Link, a China expert and professor at Princeton (and a man whose name was made for long life in the blogs) explained in an excellent recent essay in the New York Review of Books the path that Mo Yan chose after the events of 1989. It is worth reading in full, but here is the crux of it:

The main challenge for Mo Yan beginning in the 1990s was to find a literary voice that he could use in the long term. Red Sorghum had been a genuine breakthrough, but only because of the political situation of the 1980s, when Chinese writers could make their names by “breaking into forbidden zones.” Red Sorghum had broken into two: sexual libertinism and truth-telling about the war with Japan. But by the 1990s there were fewer forbidden zones awaiting break-in, and those that did remain (the 1989 massacre, corruption among the political elite, and topics like Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang) were so extremely forbidden as to be untouchable. Mo Yan needed something else.

The voice that he has embraced has been called Rabelaisian, but it is even more earthy than Rabelais’s. The animal nature of human beings—eating, excreting, fighting, screaming, bleeding, sweating, fornicating—abounds, as do certain traits that animals eschew, such as bullying, conniving, and betraying. (…)

Mo Yan writes about people at the bottom of society, and in “The Garlic Ballads”(1988) he clearly sides with poor farmers who are bullied and bankrupted by predatory local officials. Sympathy for the downtrodden has had a considerable market in the world of Chinese letters in recent times, mainly because the society does include a lot of downtrodden and they do invite sympathy. But it is crucial to note the difference between the way Mo Yan writes about the fate of the downtrodden and the way writers like Liu Xiaobo, Zheng Yi, and other dissidents do. Liu and Zheng denounce the entire authoritarian system, including the people at the highest levels. Mo Yan and other inside-the-system writers blame local bullies and leave the top out of the picture. [emphasis added]

The central character of “Pow” is Luo Xiaotong, a village boy who, like Mr Mo, grew up in difficult circumstances. And like Mr Mo, Xiaotong certainly likes telling stories. The book is set in a crumbling temple where Xiaotong narrates the story of his life to a wise old monk, whose “ear hair alone is enough to inspire reverence for the man”. He starts one stormy night and goes on for the next two days, all the while relating events unfolding in and around the temple in an increasingly absurd counter-narrative.

In the narrative of the past, Luo Xiaotong is a ten-year-old boy obsessed with meat. Cow, pig, dog, sheep, goat, donkey, camel, anything will do. (Chickens, however, make only the rare appearance.) But his father has ditched the family for another woman, and his mother struggles to make ends meet. The pages are filled with yearning.

Another kind of flesh suffuses “Pow!”: the village head is a notorious womaniser; Luo Xiaotong’s father is eventually undone by his love for Aunty Wild Mule; half the village seems to be wearing “the green hat of a cuckold”. In the present, beautiful, almost-naked women regularly flit in and out of Xiaotong’s field of vision and distant orgies beam their way into Xiaotong’s mind. So far, so Mo Yan.

Other, more obvious themes feature too. Corruption is rife. Indeed it is injected into every cut of meat that passes through Xiaotong’s village and passed on in hundreds of red envelopes. Longing and desire is everywhere, as is contentment when those desires are, astonishingly, met. Few characters want to rock the boat. They prosper as a result.

It is hard to deny that in this novel, as in his earlier work, Mr Mo toes the party line. But by refusing to hammer opinions into his writing, Mr Mo forces readers to look more carefully at his characters. With “Pow!”, it is not unreasonable to surmise that he despairs at the state of his society, but only as so many of us in other countries despair at the state of ours. Mr Link’s criticism, that Mr Mo stops short of indicting those who are truly responsible for how China’s society has turned out, seeks to engage him in a conversation that he is simply not having. As with a piece of art titled “untitled”, it is entirely up to the reader to take from “Pow!” what he will.

In the afterword, Mr Mo insists that the sole purpose of the book is the act of narration. In his Nobel speech, he three times described himself as a storyteller, nothing more. Much of that speech was a moving account of growing up poor in rural China. It is, then, easy to conclude that Mr Mo, having grown up in poverty and with very little, is grateful for where life has taken him and for what his country has done for him and allowed him to do. China has changed beyond recognition since the time that Mr Mo was a child. It may not be a freer place now than it was then. But it at least is richer and cleaner with a better life for many if not all of its citizens. It takes a brave man to appreciate that. And then there are other, braver, men to demand more.

Readers' comments

MO’s prose in Pow! brings to mind the literary technique used in one of the best known and best loved of the ancient Chinese novels 水滸傳 where the author offered an intimate portrayal of a group of villagers who lived under the pompous, heartless rule of local government officials. In 水滸傳, in spite of its enormous cast (100 some odd men and women), all the characters came across as distinct personalities, convincingly and in depth. The many episodes were closely meshed as integral parts of a whole, and offered an intimate portrayal of the people and the society in which they lived. I believe Mo’s works beginning with the Red Sorghum accomplish this much, and it is a lot – an intimate portrayal of the people he knows and the society in which they live.

Western critics of literary works created by authors from other cultures suffer from an innocent lack of awareness that not all people in the world see things through their eyes and experience life through the shutters of their soul. Mo writes the way he chooses to write. It is none of anyone’s business to tell him he ought to put his food on a plate and pierce each morsel with a fork.

But Professor Link's essay in the New York Review of Books is indeed worth the reading in that he didn't pass the usual blanket judgment. Thank you, Analects, for bringing to us that material.

Western critics clearly don't understand anything about China. This can be clearly illustrated by the NYT's review and TE's emphasis on the following comments:

"But it is crucial to note the difference between the way Mo Yan writes about the fate of the downtrodden and the way writers like Liu Xiaobo, Zheng Yi, and other dissidents do. Liu and Zheng denounce the entire authoritarian system, including the people at the highest levels. Mo Yan and other inside-the-system writers blame local bullies and leave the top out of the picture."

Western critics think that China's problems are caused by top Chinese officials of the "authoritarian" system. In contrast, most of the general Chinese think that China's problems are caused by low-rank Chinese officials. And MO Yan told stories about these problems. That explains why the general Chinese do not find any fascinating aspect in LIU Xiaobo's novels but they find many appealing stories from MO Yan's novels - even though MO Yan never endorsed the Chinese Communist Party - especially in the county and country level.

MO Yan's says that his strength is that he does not have any ideology. This comment is so great that most of the Chinese must agree with it. The Chinese are very pragmatic. If Western ideology is really good, then why most of the democratic countries in Africa are poor? Why most of the democratic countries in Asia are worse than China? So Western ideology is just not convincing.

MO Yan is deemed as a successful Chinese writer because the hearts of the general Chinese resonate with his works. LIU Xiaobo is deemed as a failure in China because both his ideology and his works failed to resonate with the hearts of the general Chinese.

Therefore, it sounds odd to the general Chinese when LIU Xiaobo got a Nobel price of Peace. LIU Xiao's ideology resonates with the thought of the West but his is never a dish that fits the Chinese.

To conclude, Western critics don't understand why MO Yan is popular in China - just like they don't understand why LIU Xiaobo is unpopular in China. The reason is that Western critics don't understand China but they still pretend to understand China - that is the root of the problem.

Furthermore, literature becomes stilted when it is, or assumed to be, an instrumentality of politics, or its function that of serving politics.

When Stalin restricted Shostakovich’s creative freedom by subverting it to the interest of the State, the composer that was Shostakovich in effect died.

Must a writer of literature similarly serve someone’s politics, in this case, the politics of a Western critic? Can there be literature for literature’s sake?

Clearly those critics whose answer to the question is No are no more literary critics than a musicologist is a music critic. From this perspective, I find the Western critics' criticisms of Mo's work an interesting cross-cultural study rather than an annoying effrontery.

What truly frustrates Mo's Western critics is the fact that, despite their latest attempt to co-opt him, the writer simply does not have much in common with them – intellectually and ideologically. You simply can't expect the son of a destitute Chinese peasant — a man who has known hope and despair in equal measures — to agree on everything with the Ive League/Oxbridge toffs who churn out "reviews" for the Anglo-American intelligentsia. Unless, as a teenager, you also had to fight hunger by eating grass and tree bark, it’s presumptuous of you to pretend that you are privy to Mo Yan’s inner thought process then and now, as Mr Link and the author of this post so offhandedly do.

Let's say, hypothetically, these so-called "forbidden zones" are magically freed up tomorrow. Will Mo Yan toe the same line on these issues as his Western detractors? Hardly.

And if you are so unimpressed by this person, there’s a way for you to change things, but you would have to quit your day job first. Vilifying others on your blog for their lack of “bravery” is rather cheap these days.

I read your comment very carefully and agree with everything you said. Everything. From 小康社会 to noting: the West's main fault is that it is unable to sincerely feel happy for Chinese people's advancements over the last 35 years.

With rare exceptions, we read here on TE's Analects the type of reporting you described - The Western press will briefly mention some of China's achievements, then devote the other 99% of the story to what's wrong with China...giving Western audiences a prejudiced, one-dimensional view of China as a fiendish yellow peril.

I am not sure what motivates Western journalists, or what exactly they seek to accomplish, in this sophomoric endeavor.

OK or not OK to do (at some point it is not OK), a mature critic knows what is is, what isn't isn't. No amount of willful distortions will change either one of those two things.

I agree with you critics in the West will be better respected by those of us who know China if they learn how to apply their own standards and measures to their own affairs, and quit basking in the ignorance of a horse that sees everyone else's face as too long.

This has to be one of the sillier comments I've read about China recently. The vast majority of Chinese of any or no ideological orientation have no illusions about the elite at the top of the rent-seeking system that they live in. Both local and national elites extract rent in the same way, it's just that the damage caused by the national elite is less directly visible.
Mo Yan is a great writer no matter how he really feels in his heart about the Communist Party. The man has lived through both the disastrous great leap forward and the equally disastrous great proletarian cultural revolution. The post-Mao Party establishment has spared him and today's young Chinese from having to go through that again and from the looks of it China will be able to become what Deng Xiaoping called a 小康社会 (xiǎokāng shèhuì), a moderately well-off society. You can't hold it against him or the Chinese people that they don't immediately join the latest western politico-moral crusade, e.g. human rights, rule of law, abolition of the death penalty, etc. They are more aware immediately aware than westerners of what they have to loose if China were to descend into chaos. But neither are those who push for political reform "western" or "anti-China". Just because really existing western liberal democracy is turning out to be a colossal failure doesn't mean that there is anything on the level of abstract principles that China would do well to study and adopt.
The fault of the west, then, doesn't lie in that it sympathizes with Liu Xiaobo or any other liberal intellectual/writer. Those people are not anti-China nor are Chinese people inherently ill-adapted to liberalism and democracy. The west's main fault is that it is unable to sincerely feel happy for Chinese's people's advancements over the last 35 years, and the Chinese are keenly sensitive to this sort of condescension. The western press will briefly mention some of China's achievements, then devote the other 99% of the story to what's wrong with China. That's OK for journalists to do, but the practical effect is that it gives western audiences a prejudiced, one-dimensional view of China as either a fiendish yellow peril seeking to bring down the west or a North Korea that oppresses its people and is on the brink of collapse. If the west wants to be loved and respected by China it needs to get its own house in order so that it can gain the self-respect and self-confidence it needs to open it's heart to China and accept it despite its current flaws.

There is (and has been for some decades) an unfortunately widespread view in Western letters that, to be great literature a novel must say something dramatic about society as a whole. And preferably view with alarm (better yet, denounce) one of more of the institutions which make up society. That a novel might be great literature while merely telling an engaging story and telling it well seems to be not only foreign to that view, but actively abhored by it.

Our own literature would be much improved if we accepted that it is at least as important (actually far more important) to write well something that people are actually interested in reading as it is to comment on society or the human condition.

In the case of Mo, the censors are "Western critics" who pressured him (through their so-called "literary criticisms") to write their propaganda and he graciously refused. [Cf. my and others' comments on same point.]

It is always nice to share items of knowledge, the best part of exchanging with fellow bloggers on these blogs. Now I know 水滸傳 had long been translated into Japanese, and made into a TV series in the late 1970's, and the BBC broadcasted the series in the mid-1980's, and a Japanese person in London both read the Japanese translation and watched the TV dramatization in the English voice-over version in London. The world is smaller than we reckon and larger than the sum total of all parochial journalists (a few of whom populate TE) and ivory-tower academicians thumping half-baked knowledge and misplaced zeal, generally making hoopla for what hoopla is not worth. Thank you for getting back to me on 水滸伝, Anjin-San.

ChinaEagle , are you sure that you understand something about China? Yes , you represent surely the most "counter-revolutionary" part of China, the ones that few decades ago will have been executed, isn't it? The ones, decades ago, will have maintained China is a state of high corruption and disunity. Don't forget the movement of May 1919 or the creation of Beijing University when the leaders or the founders all rejected your reactionary interpretation of Confucius - they even decided that the reasons China was in such bad state in 1905 or even worst in 1919 was the result of your way to teach Confucius concepts. But, by chance, your reactionary tendency didn't prevail and great Chinese leaders as Mao Tse Toung, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, etc help to build a New China, a New Unity of China. The China of today is the result of the incredible work and pain and hope and joy and mistakes and successes of the Chinese People. To try, as you are doing in all your comments, to deny what the Chinese have done the last century is the proof you don't belong to the Chinese community which is a part of the World Community. China still today is Communist - the Communist Party has 86 millions members. I have not seen in any document that the Chinese Communist Party has changed his Marxist doctrine in a reactionary interpretation of Confucius that you pretend to promote. It is so absurd to think like you dod that there is only ONE interpretation of Confucius - the one you like which is a cliché and mainly a non-sense compared to the very riches and complex and often contradictory interpretations of Confucius. It is also ridiculous , totally ridiculous to reduce what you called the "Chinese mentality" to YOUR stupid interpretation of Confucius. The greatness of the Chinese culture is exactly at its opposite - the greatness of the Chinese culture is by essence its great diversity - it includes many philosophical traditions with none of them dominant one. The greatness of China is to make possible the co-existences of different philosophies - it is probably one of the main reasons who makes China so strong, so capable to manage such incredible crisis.
You, you represent, one of these tendencies which has help to destroy China from times to times during its long History.

Anjin-San,
I had no idea BBC talked about The Marsh Chronicles (another translation). Now I must google to see what else it had to say. As you know, 水滸傳 was written in the 14th century, according to present consensus among Chinese scholars. There are disputes over the authorship and authenticity and dates of the various editions. The important thing to know about the work is it is a remarkable literary tour de force. By telling the stories of real men and women, the author(s) provided a voice of the oppressed ones in society.

Mo is an excellent writer. For those "Western critics" who talk this and that and the other about him, I wish they would address his Chinese prose and appreciate the literary excellence in it. For God's sake, I can't stand various comtemporary "Western" writers in America who are prize winners(Philip Roth comes to mind) whose works read like interminable therapy sessions on the couch - whining, moaning self-absorption, saying the same things over and over until they bore you to death. Mo isn't this kind of a writer. How refreshing! Apparently there were enough readers in the Nobel Committee who have a larger perspective about literature.

I had no idea the number was 108. Thanks for telling me. No idea either that in Buddhism there are 108 human desires. Sounds more like the Periodic Table! I wonder if everyone has all of them, and if they do, whether they can name them. I suppose the 109th desire is the ambition to name all 108. If you can get a hold of a translation (possilby translated into Japanese too, I have no idea!), try read it . It is immense fun! The descriptions of the characters in the novel are so vivid and the tales so judiciously dramatic they are more real than anything 3D you see now in theater. Alas! The more high- tech things get, the less enchanting they have become, IMHO. Maybe I am just too old fashioned. :) Thanks for noticing my analogy. I was amazed no one else commented on it.

Actually, there was a Japanese TV series that dramatized 水滸伝 in the late 1970s, and it was broadcast on BBC in mid-1980s with English voice-over (not subtitles). I have indeed read the Japanese translation of the novel back in my Secondary School years (school library was a valuable source of Japanese literature when Japanese bookstores in London were very few and expensive).

The focal character of "Pow" is Luo Xiaotong, a village kid who, for instance Mr Mo, acted like an adult in challenging circumstances. Furthermore like Mr Mo, Xiaotong unquestionably likes telling stories. The book is situated in a disintegrating sanctuary where Xiaotong portrays the story of his existence to a shrewd old minister, whose "ear hair alone is sufficient to motivate adoration for the man". He begins one stormy night and goes ahead for the following two days, at the same time identifying occasions unfolding in and around the sanctuary in an undeniably preposterous counter-story. DC Ranch homes for salé